May 19, 2013

THE LOCH NESS STORY

by
Nicholas Witchell

238
pages, Corgi Books

Review
by Pat Black

The
Loch Ness Monster: one of the strongest creatures in the world. Able to carry
an entire tourist industry on its humpfy back.

Yes,
with a little bit of sunlight on the way and Britain’s hard-working politicians
weighing up what to do with their enormous summer break, silly season will soon
be upon us. That used to mean news stories featuring the elusive beast in the
title – a large animal that breaches the surface of Scotland’s Loch Ness every
now and again, startling a surprisingly large number of guest house owners. Sometimes,
a picture would be involved – always grainy, out-of-focus, indistinct.
Something that could be a monster.

Nowadays,
there are far fewer Nessie stories in the papers, but some tabloid reporters
and editors still bite whenever a leaping fish, a rotten tree stump, a gaseous
belch from the depths or even a jobbie makes for a convincing enough page 5 photo.
The mystery endures.

Nicholas
Witchell is a familiar face from BBC news. Incredibly ginger, he is now in the
pre-retirement holding pen for many a distinguished journalist, otherwise known
as “royal correspondent”. While he follows Wills, Harry, Kate, Charles and
Camilla around on various junkets both at home and abroad, it’s easy to forget
that he was a very big deal in the newsroom throughout the 1980s and 90s, anchoring
prime-time bulletins and breaking stories. Indeed, he was one of the first reporters
to confirm the news of Diana’s death in Paris. He has pissed off the Prince of
Wales on occasion, so he is doing something right. At the very least he is
holding true to George Orwell’s famous definition of good journalism:
publishing material another person doesn’t want you to read.

Does
the Loch Ness Monster believe in Nicholas Witchell? Maybe we’ll never know, but
he’s probably one of the most well-known, and credible, Nessie hunters. This
edition of his book, The Loch Ness Story,
was printed in 1989, but it’s a revision of the book Witchell first wrote in
the early 1970s when he was still in his teens. In reading through the early
chapters, I was struck by the young Witchell’s romantic zeal, his desperation
to turn up evidence of the legendary water horse. One summer during his
undergraduate years, Witchell simply pitched up at Loch Ness, near the ruins of
Castle Urquhart – a key location for Nessie-spotting – built a hut, and stayed there for the whole summer.

Now,
we don’t know if that hut included proper toilet and washing facilities, and it
may be wise to draw a discreet veil – or rather, a good quality acrylic curtain
– over that side of the Loch Ness story. But what a brilliant endeavour! What
balls! “I’m going up to Scotland to find Nessie, mum. I’ll be back in
September.” Barely out of his teens, Witchell was soon taking part in
subsequent scientific inquiries, as well as presenting talks on the creature,
arguing in favour of there being an unknown family of animals in the peaty soup
of Britain's biggest inland body of water by volume.

Witchell
was a believer, and apart from a few good-natured jabs at Nessie photo fails of
the past, the book is a sober attempt to gather facts, examine witness
statements and engage in serious discussion over what the animal known as the
Loch Ness Monster could be.

It’s
lovely that he managed to get a book out of it and set his career up. But I do
wonder what Nicholas Witchell thinks about Nessie now. In the book, he speaks of the epiphany of seeing for the first
time the famous “Surgeon’s photograph” of 1934. You’ve almost certainly seen
it: an uncharacteristically clear shot of a long-necked creature, moving
serenely through the water. I used to feel the same as Witchell about that
photo. In fact, as a boy I used it as incontrovertible proof that there was a
monster in Loch Ness, flashing my copy of Usborne’s World of Unknown Monsters at scoffers and naysayers. “Look, it’s
there, I tell ye! There’s a photo! How can you argue with that?”

Except
of course, it seems that the photo was a hoax. Just a toy submarine, with a
clay sculpture stuck on top. There is a grim, unintentional irony in reading Witchell’s
rebuttals to sceptics, using this photo as a foundation stone for his
conviction that Nessie exists.

Hey,
for what it’s worth, Nicholas, I was gutted when I found out. There’s a part of
me still in denial. “Well, the surgeon never said it was a fake when he was
alive! You can’t prove it was a hoax! He may have had enemies whose offspring
wanted to discredit him!”

Similarly,
I find it difficult to get cynical about a number of other canonical pieces of
photographic evidence – Robert Rines’ “flipper” photograph of the 1970s, or the
equally famous Tim Dinsdale film footage. As part of Operation Deepscan in
1987, there were strange results taken from sonar sweeps of the loch, seeming
to prove that there is something swimming around down there, “bigger than a
shark, smaller than a whale”. Although Witchell comes across as no-one’s fool,
and he is quick to point out and ridicule the more blatant frauds and hoaxes,
we now have to wonder about the provenance of the more plausible manifestations
of the creature. You can fake a photo. That’s for sure.

Although
Witchell details the downright contempt of many members of the scientific
community towards the search for Nessie, there were some who took up cudgels
for the monster-hunters’ cause. Gerard Durrell and Sir Peter Scott provide
forewords to this book, while the last word is left to zoologist Denys W. Tucker,
who points out that the French naturalist Pierre Denys de Montfort was
ridiculed by his 19th century peers for publishing papers on the
existence of giant squid. Tucker hypothesises that the creature is some form of
plesiosaurus, alive and well in the present day – an idea that still makes its
way into picture books and movies about the creature.

The
coelacanth analogy is drawn, which Tucker himself professed to be a little
tired of even in the 1970s. “Hey, a coelacanth was thought to be extinct – but
they found one! So why not a plesiosaurus?” runs the common argument. But a coelacanth
is a fish, living in the ocean, where it is more easily concealed. Admittedly
it was a fantastic find, a zoological bombshell. But if you want to look at another
prehistoric fish which has survived to the present day almost unchanged by
evolution, look at a shark. In fact, if you want to see a living prehistoric reptile,
look at a crocodile. Flies, spiders and snakes haven’t changed their design
much over the millennia, either. The commonplace notion of a species surviving
over the ages more or less unchanged doesn’t quite fit the extraordinary
circumstances necessary to support the idea of a large, lake-dwelling dinosaur still
alive and well in Scotland.

The
book’s a quick, entertaining jaunt, but the anecdotes are repetitive. There’s
only so many ways you can inject a bit of excitement into the Nth description
that goes something like: “There was a big splash, and then a long neck
appeared in the water, followed by two or three humps. Then it was gone. I’ve
never seen anything like it.”

To
Witchell’s credit, he does wonder whether this points to there being a creature
in the water which looks exactly as described, or whether it’s a form of
confirmation bias (or autosuggestion, to borrow his diagnosis). In other words,
you see a splash, a wake or indeed an object in the water, and because you’re
so desperate to see a monster… well, you see a monster.

I
should dearly like to own the painting which this book takes for its cover. It
shows two “Nessies” just beneath the surface of the loch. There are long necks
and giraffe-like heads topped with little space bopper-style protuberances. The
creatures are benign, bovine. You’d swear one of them has an enigmatic wee smile
on its face. The Monster Lisa?

They
don’t look as if they’d eat you. Apart from Ferocious-Ness in The Family Ness,
Nessie is often depicted as an unusually mild monster – and it’s usually
referred to as a “she”. Terms of endearment. And maternal, too – a baby Nessie
is often shown alongside a mummy Nessie. The Nessie myth must be among the most
beloved in the world.

It’s
curious that the story is only really 80 years old. We know of Saint Columba’s
brush with the monster in Loch Ness in 565AD, but he’s not the first saint to
have been mythologised as having defeated some kind of serpent. There is bugger
all else about Nessie until 1933, when a road was constructed along the shores
of the loch. Soon, reports about some strange animal in the water began to
flood in. Then came the game-changer; the Surgeon’s photograph. From there, the
national press got involved, and the rest is history.

How
ironic, then, that just as the explosion of photography in the popular press
made the myth, the ubiquity of mobile phones has almost killed it. Ditto
ghosts, Bigfoot and UFOs. Surely if these things appeared in real life, then
they’d be documented all the time? If I saw Nessie tomorrow I could have
crystal clear video footage and photography at the instant – and my phone ain’t
all that. Thanks to technological advances, it’s actually harder to take one of
those classic grainy page 5 tabloid photos than a nice clean, clear picture -
unless you’ve got an App which dirties it up for you. In fact, there’s probably
a “Nessiefier” which inserts the beast into any body of water you like.

Our
stories and myths are a necessary sacrifice before the altar of truth,
rationality and progress, but… You know, there’s a wee bit of me that enjoys
tall tales, irrationality and mythology. Witchell hits the nail on the head
early on in the book when he points out that we need a little bit of mystery,
intrigue or plain amusement to make our simple, unspectacular and sometimes boring
lives that bit more bearable. I’m not sure if Witchell’s hut is still there on
the shores of Loch Ness, or whether he – like a number of other people – still
spends a lot of his spare time poised by the water, camera at the ready, hoping
to find conclusive proof of Nessie’s existence. I’m hoping to go to Loch Ness
soon. And you can bet I’ll be on the lookout. Even if the most cynical person
in the world saw something breaching in Loch Ness, their camera would be
clickin’.

The
waters are still murky enough to support the legend. We don’t know exactly how
deep the loch goes, or what’s in there. It’s hard to survey and study
adequately. The water is impenetrably dark with peat, so visibility is
practically nil. Some research has pointed towards the existence of vast caves,
and there’s a suggestion that the loch was connected to the sea until very
recently in geological terms. There is no proper explanation for those sonar
results and scans which do point to some unidentified, large creature
patrolling the depths. Perhaps the explosion in tourism in the region in the
past 80 years with its boatloads of monster hunters has scared the beastie back
into the depths? There’s still much that we don’t know. And hey – the Highlands
is a wonderful place to visit, monster or no monster. The scenery is so
beautiful that you might take your eye off the surface of the water, for that
one crucial moment…

I
was a passionate believer in the Loch Ness Monster when I was a wee boy. Well,
time hardens our hearts, and tightens the cogs of our minds. But even now, the
closest you’ll get to outright scepticism from me on the question of whether or
not there’s a monster in Loch Ness is a shrug of the shoulders and a “who
knows?”

But
I know, and you know, there probably isn’t a Nessie.

Unless
it’s a type of giant eel. Or a sturgeon. Or an oarfish. Because unknown species
of fish have been found in Loch Ness before.

And
while the Surgeon’s photograph may be discredited, I’d point you towards a less
well-known image, taken by a man called PA Macnab in the summer of 1955. It
shows Castle Urquhart near Drumnadrochit, and the composition is suspiciously
discrete, but…

Well.
If the image is undoctored, then I don’t know what the hell that thing in the
water is.